Wielded by anyone but a true master, a pun is the lowest form of humor. However, wielded by a master, a pun is the highest, purest form of humor possible by humans.

Puns are a dark art, much like necromancy. Raising the deadwill get you killed. Raising a pun with your killer sense of humor will get you killed, making it a grave mistake, even if you were dead serious.

Puns can be categorized into the following:

One Liners

Micro-Liners:
Made in only a few words, these can only be wielded by true pun masters (Think word-within-a-word)

Epics:

This is the most evil form of pun magic. An epic is when someone finds a basic enough pun, then creates an incredibly detailed background for it, taking as much as hours to read, then ending it with the most basic one-liner or even micro-liner. The key to these is to find a pun that is the easiest to set up, then just drag it out as intricately as possible to create a story that feels like it will have an incredible ending, but ends with a three-word micro-liner.

WARNING:
Practice puns with a friend who does not know how to commit murder, otherwise you will be brutally disemboweled. Until you can call yourself a true master, avoid using them in public. (Shameless plug: #puns and #pungrandmasters on Kik has a lot of pun-lovers, including me, the master, who will aid you in your dark humor quests without brutally murdering you... usually)

*cracks fingers*
I can't quit put my finger on what goes here. On the other hand, I might just be able to single-handedly do this job. Mashing on this keyboard reminds me of when I dated one a while back, but she wasn't my type. She was ugly enough to make a man screen. She turned my hard drive into a floppy disk fast. Do you C: what I did there? Start a conversation with me and there's no escape, no alternative exit, no end. I have 12 difference functions of puninsanity. I control everything. You can DOS all hope out of the Windows, to get hit by a BUS, and drown in water. "Water you talking about?" you say? What, did those slip right bayou? I'm tide of people not understanding my deep puns; Wave been over this many times before. This is hardly a current problem. How can I get anymore pacific with what I'm doing here? Islanded puns repeatedly. There's Flo stopping it now, you can be insured of that. Unlike others, my puns get progressively better, to the point where they're auto. I'll cripple you to a vegetable with these, I don't carrot all. You'll be artichoked to death, and buried. Try getting to the root of the problem now. These come in spades, you hoe, dig it? I'll shovel these puns down your throat, till you're infertile.

As for meta-puns, have you ever met a pun? My pun-chlines pun-ish pun-ks pun-ctually (overkill), do you punderstand? Don't punderestimate me. These'll sting more than accu-pun-cture and veni-pun-cture combined... etc etc etc etc..........

A pun is, quite simply, a play on words. There are many types, but in general, they all utilize one word that is relevant to the subject matter at hand, but is impractical in context. If formed correctly, a pun can be humorous, and can sometimes derail any given conversation in itself.

Puns are common comedic tools in literature, conversation, blogging, and all other sorts of digital and interpersonal communication. However, they are surprisingly complicated, and the concept of what comprises a pun can be confusing. Simple puns, such as humorous rhymes (i.e., *guy sees a woman get decapitated in a movie* "Geez, she didn't need to lose her head over that."), are not unfamiliar to the average speaker, and most of us have used them since our earliest years. Complex puns, such as the use of words in actual sentence structure (for example, *daughter gets her father an Icee slushie* "Icee what you did there!") require some degree of verbal and dictional proficiency.

Some guidelines:

1. It should be clearly relevant to the topic of discussion at hand, while being unnecessary (i.e, it certainly would not be the first thing you would use).

A play on words. Generally a pun takes a word that is quite understandable in context and replaces it with a homonym (same-sounding word) to create an entirely newmeaning, or replaces a word with a similar-sounding one to the same effect.